MU Cha-Ching

[mu_hilltopper]

MONDAY, Dec. 18, 2006, 3:20 p.m.
By Jesse Garza

Couple gives $25 million to Marquette
The Marquette University College of Engineering has received a gift commitment of more than $25 million as the first part of a legacy grant that could provide the university with an additional $1 million a year in perpetuity, Marquette President Robert A. Wild announced today.

The gift is from an engineering alumnus and his wife who have asked to remain anonymous and "who have given anonymously and generously to the university in the past," Wild said.

Julie Tolan, vice president of University Advancement, said the $25 million gift, given through their private foundation, brings to nearly $50 million the amount the couple has given to Marquette, making them the largest single benefactors in the university's history.

[LastWarrior]

The gift is from an engineering alumnus and his wife who have asked to remain anonymous

Is that you Spiral???

[spiral97]

yep... that's why I still get game tickets up in the nosebleeds *sigh*

I _WISH_ I could afford to donate $50 million...

Just gotta win the lottery..

[MUEng92]

Well, I can narrow down the list of possible engineering alumni who are making this donation by one, because it is not me.

Someone is rolling in the dough!  I must have taken the wrong electives.

For you Finance majors, what would the principal investment have to be for a $1M annual donation "in perpetuity"?

[downtown85]

the formula for calculating the present value of a perpetuity is as follows:  PV=Pmt/i

PV = Present value
Pmt= payment (in this case $1 million)
i= interest rate.

If you assume a 5% interest rate then that means the principal amount must be about $20 million. 

[rocky_warrior]

Oh, so they must have been saying the $25MM would provide about $1MM, not that they were hoping to raise enough to get to $1MM (because they already have).

[MUEng92]

My understanding of the article is that the $25M is separate from the $1M annual payments.  And these are both in addition to the $25M the couple donated in the past.

[Mayor McCheese]

thats a sickly ridiculous amount of money, however I am going into Education, so I'll never see anywhere near that amount of money, until I get my sugar momma!

[MUjunkie77]

Is there any talk of MU getting an entirely new Engineering building in the near future? I know the talk has been a new Life Science building and Law school.

[rocky_warrior]

Is there any talk of MU getting an entirely new Engineering building in the near future?

Yes, though it's unclear exactly what direction they'll go.  If you've been in the engineering building (Haggerty) in the past few years, you've probably seen Discovery Learning Center.  They're pretty proud of this (though I wasn't *that* impressed) so they're considering a "Discovery Learning Tower" for the new building. 

Here's a doc that covers the DLC
http://www.marquette.edu/engineering/pages/GettingInvolved/files/ENGMASTERFEB03.pdf
And then lots of the discussion of the "tower" in this MU Engineering magazine (see esp p6)
http://www.mu.edu/engineering/pages/GettingInvolved/files/MUENGMAGSP06LAYOUT%20(2).pdf
as well as a discussion here
http://www.mu.edu/engineering/pages/AllYouNeed/Faculty/sitevisitreports.html